Whimsical
old-fashioned filming of a modern-day political fairy
tale for adults, delivering an overly sentimental but
warmhearted Marxist message pic about the necessity of
sticking together to fight for your rights. Finnish
writer-director Aki Kaurismaki("The Man
Without A Past"/"Drifting Clouds"/"Leningrad Cowboys
Go America") in a smart-alecky but gentle way gives
his fantasy film a Howard Hawks Hollywood turn, as he
pays homage to his resistant fighter movies from WW2
and also offers a nod to community activists, as he
gleefully salivates as he presents a utopian agenda as
compensation for society's white guilt-trip over their
confusing unworkable immigration laws. The
tongue-in-cheek presentation astounds with a
simplistic social conscience story line on how reality
can be rosy if only people cared about each other,
especially those of another race. To make Kaurismaki's
utopian reality obviously unreal, all those in favor
of refugees in France are treated as saints while
those opposed are viewed as if they were a Judas.

Former
bohemian Marcel
Marx (André Wilms), a free-spirit, with a loyal
and loving Finnish wife, Arletty (Kati Outinen), and a friendly dog named
Laika, works in the poverty-stricken section of Le
Havre, mostly at the railway station by the docks, as
a shoeshine man, and is a popular figure in the
tight-knit working-class
neighborhood
with the local store owners. The shoeshiner
inadvertently encounters a black African refugee
adolescent boy named Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), traveling alone to
London to reunite with his mom, who was a stowaway in
a ship's container, on a ship from West Africa that is
stuck on the dock for days because of a bureaucratic
screw-up. When the illegals in the container were
caught, the kid runs away from the police. Marcel
identifies with his plight and vows to get the quiet
kid there by hiding him from a mysterious trench-coat
wearing snoopy police inspector (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) investigating a call from
a nosy neighbor (Jean-Pierre Léaud) that the wanted boy is
living with Marcel.

Marcel is helped by fellow
shoeshine worker Chang (Quoc-dung Nguyen), a refugee from Vietnam,
who is now a French citizen, and all the good-hearted
proprietors in his neighborhood, in his attempt to get
the kid to London and not be deported. Meanwhile
Marcel's wife has been diagnosed with terminal cancer
and is staying at the hospital for treatment, but not
wanting to upset hubby tells him the cancer is benign.

The feelgood and anti-authoritarian
working-class solidarity pic has little to say
that's new about illegals. But the slight pic has a
droll humor, is upbeat, makes for a pleasantly
harmless watch, and is OK by me for preferring acts of
compassion than voicing loud polemical political
statements.